General Motors CEO Mary Barra testified before Congress today that the company is still investigating why the company failed to order a recall until February 2014 on cars with flawed ignition switches that killed at least 13 people.
 

“Sitting here today, I cannot tell you why it took years for a safety defect to be announced in that (small-car) program, but I can tell you that we will find out.When we have answers, we will be fully transparent with you, with our regulators and with our customers.”
 

We wanted to get your opinion in today’s poll: Is GM hiding something?
 

At the time of this post, 65% responded YES; 35% said NO.
 

Of those who voted YES, one responder wrote it’s just like when “Ford lied about Pinto and explosive gas tanks on rear view collisions. Too expensive to fix and they felt a ‘little’ loss of life justified saved cost of recall.”
 

On the other side, one NO voter said, “There's a difference between A) malicious intent in hiding or burying information and B) being stupid, poorly structured, mismanaged, and just a piss-poor quality organization. Did someone, somewhere, inside GM hide something? Probably. They should be fired. But is there a valid conspiracy theory that the organization is deliberately hiding information? Probably not. It just needs to be reorganized and run like a real business.”
 

Another NO commenter explained, “If you study the Ford Pinto fires case, you can uncover how recall works and the challenges behind it.  You must identify a problem, find traceable cause, and then decide if the recall is needed.  That can take time.  When thousands die in fully functional cars, it’s hard to identify real traceable problems.”
 

Hedgeye Managing Director Moshe Silver also argued NO, summing up that “someone within GM is probably hiding something, but they've been taking advantage of weak spots in the oversight structure and hiding it from management and the board too. It’s highly unlikely that the corporate entity is hiding anything relating to the recalls. Every organization has its blind spots. The bigger the organization - and the more the compensation is detached from performance - the bigger the blind spots become.”

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